Gateway Unified School District trustees Elias and Lindsi Haynes.
At a hastily called special meeting Tuesday night, the newly elected anti-establishment majority on the Gateway Unified School District Board of Trustees plans to fire superintendent Jim Harrell. Harrell, a prominent member of Bethel, is in the ninth year of a 10-year contract. According to insiders, the board intends to replace Harrell with failed Shasta County Schools Superintendent of Schools candidate Bryan Caples, a thrice-fired white Christian nationalist who was crushed by long-serving incumbent Judy Flores 57 percent to 43 percent in the June primary election.
If the name Caples sounds familiar, that’s because it should. Last February, A News Café was the first news outlet to break the story that the failed candidate had been fired from his last three stints as a school district superintendent. Many northern California news outlets picked up on the story. Caples’ sketchy work history is no secret.
The new Gateway majority formed after Cherrill Clifford and Lindsi Haynes were elected to the GUSD Board of Trustees in November and sworn in at last week’s regularly scheduled board meeting. They join Elias Haynes, Lindsi’s husband who was appointed to the board two years ago, in a 3-2 majority facing off against long time incumbents Phil Lewis and Dale Wallace.
A News Café contacted Lindsi and Elias Haynes, Clifford, Lewis, Wallace and superintendent Harrell for comment on this story. No one replied. The district includes Buckeye School of the Arts, Central Valley High School, Grand Oaks Elementary, Mountain Lakes High School and Shasta Lake School. According to teachers, staff and parents who contacted A News Café, tensions are mounting across the district as news of the new board’s plan to fire Harrel and hire Caples has spread.
Indeed, conditions are so intense no one who talked to A News Café was willing to go on the record for fear of reprisal, should Caples be hired to be the new superintendent. But after consulting with approximately 10 people who work in the district or have children who attend schools in the district, a picture began to take shape of a school district still struggling to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, as the new board majority seeks to settle old scores.
Superintendent Harrell purportedly had the misfortune of catching an extremely bad case of COVID-19 early on and took a long time to recover. According to multiple sources, during this time period, a small cadre of right-leaning teachers and parents united by the medical freedom/anti-vaccination movement began voicing its displeasure about public health mandates at board meetings.
Arrested development: Rich Gallardo removed from the Shasta County Board of Supervisors podium, 2021.
Local gadflies Rich Gallardo and Delores Lucero made frequent threatening appearances, as they did last week, vowing to recall anyone who doesn’t follow their insane agenda, which includes cutting already-strapped education budgets to the bone. Many of the sources that contacted A News Café did so because of Gallardo’s confrontational behavior and the new majority’s sudden decision to call a special meeting to fire Harrell.
According to some sources, Gateway’s schools weren’t totally locked down during the first year of the pandemic, but the district offices were for a time period, raising hackles. Some teachers complained that the district spent COVID funds on new office furniture for the district while all teachers got were face masks and hand cleaner.
In addition, Elias and Lindsi Haynes successfully sued the district to provide their disabled daughter with an individual aide, a fact that wasn’t widely known until after Lindsi Haynes was elected to the Gateway board.
KRCR-TV’s Mike Mangas interviews Bryan Caples.
While Harrell doesn’t necessarily enjoy widespread support among the rank-and-file, almost everyone who talked to A News Café expressed extreme reservations at the prospect of Caples replacing him, and for good reason.
According to public school board records, Caples resigned after the Scott Valley Unified School District board of trustees placed him on indefinite leave in 2013, was released from his employment agreement with the Palermo Union School District in 2018 and was terminated by the Burnt Ranch Elementary School District just last January.
From Siskiyou County to Butte County to Trinity County, Caples, 53, who has a PhD in Educational Administration and Organizational Leadership from the University of LaVerne in Los Angeles County, and who sometimes uses the honorific “Dr.” before his name, has bounced all over Northern California.
As a Christian nationalist crusader Caples preaches a version of U.S. history in which the wall separating church and state was never erected. He falsely states that Critical Race Theory and “gender confusion” are being taught in K-12 schools.
“Critical race theory, those are things that have been pushed out by our state and our county officer of education,” Caples told local TV news anchor Mike Mangas during the primary campaigning. “Our county of education is training teachers in elements of critical race theory, revisionist history, I will stop that.”
Elias Haynes supported Bryan Caples in the primary election.
It’s unclear if Caples’ name was mentioned at the Gateway meeting last week, but most of the teachers, staff and parents A News Café talked to presumed Caples was the intended replacement for Harrell. According to social media posts, Elias Haynes openly campaigned for Caples during the primary election and supported the anti-establishment candidates Erik Jensen for District Attorney and Bob Holsinger for County Clerk/Registrar of Voters. The fascist troika were soundly defeated by incumbents Flores, Stephanie Bridgett and Cathy Darling Allen.
Now, the incapable Mr. Caples appears to be on the verge of securing a six-figure job as the next superintendent of the Gateway Unified School District at the Jan. 4 board meeting, after Harrell is granted a six-figure payout Tuesday night. Most of the teachers A News Café talked to expressed anger at this waste of money.
There’s some talk about filing a Brown Act violation with the District Attorney on the new Gateway board, which appears to have colluded behind the scenes to secure Caples’ services. There are also questions about whether calling the special meeting was justified, since it involves the salary of the superintendent, which is supposed to be discussed in regular meetings.
Authur Gorman speaks at an August 2021 Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting.
Lindsi Haynes and Cherrill Clifford weren’t the only newly elected crusaders spreading their wings last week. Minutes after being sworn into the Shasta County Board of Education last Wednesday, Authur Gorman vehemently voted against updating board policies to include trans and gender-fluid students as a protected class of citizens as required by state law because it violated his “personally held beliefs” and the personally held beliefs of unnamed SCOE employees, whom he later advised via a mass internal email to sue the county.
The updated policy easily passed 6-1 and revealed Gorman for who he truly is: a Christian zealot outsider who believes his religion and the constitution permit him to discriminate against trans kids, perhaps the most persecuted minority in our education system.
A bully in other words, who placated the public with butchered Martin Luther King quotes during the campaign. I call it “blackwashing.” Now he thinks he can shove his weight around because he won 17,900 votes.
Somehow, Gorman won the most votes in the five-way contest for two board seats on Shasta County Board of Education, Area 2. Steve MacFarland finished second with 15,061 votes. Incredibly, Rich Gallardo finished third with 12,539 votes.
Gorman, who claims to support transparency in government, declined to be interviewed for this story.
Authur Gorman on the Red, White and Blueprint podcast.
Chalk these election results up to the power of disinformation. During the pandemic and the run-up to the election, Gorman appeared frequently on local alt-right media like the State of Jefferson and Red, White & Blueprint podcasts, both known for aiding and abetting local extremists. MacFarland refused to campaign.
Gallardo is a self-proclaimed citizen journalist who almost always finds himself at the center of his own investigations, which are broadcast on various obscure social media channels and subject to being surreptitiously pulled. It’s a bizarre but hardened media bubble no one can crack through once the mark is hypnotized.
This is what we’re up against in Shasta County, and make no mistake, these crusading school board members and citizen journalists are hell-bent on remaking public education in their own images. They’re already talking about recalling anyone who gets in their way. You can catch them in action Tuesday night at 4411 Mountain Lakes Blvd. at 5:30 pm.
After two years of raucous school board meetings, Shasta County’s safe-and-sane contingent may be about to push back.
“They tell you it’s about the kids,” one parent told me about the new crusaders. “That’s not true. It’s not about the kids. It’s about the agenda.”
